11 Answers
11

lowerping and smoothping both seem to get decent reviews, as well as a blog on elitistjerks that talks about some registry hacks, addon issues, and many other tips for reducing disconnects (which may also help with pings).

+1 I'm torn between voting you up for the EJ link, and voting you down for the EJ link. It's a really nice resource, but it's slightly out of date now. Could you edit the content in, so we can keep it up to date with StackExchange magic? (For example, some buffs have been modified in 3.3.3 to reduce spam.)
–
György AndrasekJul 8 '10 at 10:42

@Jurily - I would, but I think it would be more useful if someone was inspired enough to create their own guide about lowering latency that didn't include mis-information.. I was just including this post as a summary of what the EpicAdvice community had.
–
gnarfJul 8 '10 at 20:51

Dear lord, everything in this entire thread is misinformation. Decreasing ping is not equivalent to decreasing latency, any more than curing a cough is the same curing a cold. Every suggestion on this page, while decreasing ping, will actually increase the latency of packets. Any positive effects this causes are purely psychological.
–
BlueRaja - Danny PflughoeftDec 15 '14 at 22:35

2) Do you have other things using your connection? My wife and I both play (different computers) and we're at 200 ping. She turns on internet radio, bam we're up to 400 ping. Run a netstat to check for existing connections.

Well latency is primarly based on your distance to the WoW server and the network connection you have. Are you in US playing on EU servers or vice-versa? Is your Internet connection shared? Are you uploading / downloading or your neighbours sharing your connection while you play?

I used to believe the distance is the primary matter for latency too. but my own experience showed me that this is not true anymore. I still have to research for why, but just read my answer to see what I mean.
–
CawasAug 5 '10 at 20:39

Well you're right. However, by distance I mean network distance. This distance is usually measured in number of hops (routers, switches) between you and the destination server. One can usually find out the number of these hops by doing a treceroute to the target IP. In your case, the number of hops might actually be the same no matter where you moved. It might just be coincidence that in your case the number of hops are the same. Another factor is the bandwidth of these hops. If you have a crap connection somewhere in your route, your ping goes up, even if you would move closer to ze server
–
TrefexAug 6 '10 at 15:48

It follows that the non-proxy registry trick (see the answer about leatrix) is going to wreak havoc on non-gaming stuff, like downloads filling your upload capacity.

And I certainly concur about not using wireless - I don't use anything wireless except for my laptops and mobile. Thus I've never had mouse nor keyboard run out of batteries in the middle of a boss fight.

If you're playing over a wireless connection, make sure you have a strong signal to your wireless access point. Also make sure your computer and access point are both configured to use the most recent wireless specification available (802.11n is newer than 802.11g is newer than 802.11b).

If you're playing over Ethernet, make sure your network adapter is configured to use full duplex on the highest possible speed (10/100/1000 Mbps).

Close any programs on your computer that might be using a lot of bandwidth. Common culprits are streaming music and file-sharing (torrents, FTP, etc.).

A change of DNS server is unlikely to make any difference to your latency, all DNS does is tell your computer the address of the WoW servers, it should only need to do this once per server (per session) at login or zone change, so you really won't notice DNS resolution speed differences.

Sometimes it helps to turn error correction of Your internet connection off. That is, if the high latency is caused by high traffic, rather than long distance to the server.

Look into the settings possibilities of Your router. However, You don't have the guarantee that the provider is going to respect the router's query to turn error correction off. Some providers offer the possibility to do this explicitly, either for free or a small fee.

Recently I've went from Brazil to New Zealand and tried playing on same realm... I was amazed at first, my ping in NZ went up from 200 to 1k, but it was understandable due to distance... But I was even more stunned when it actually dropped, in less than 1 hour, back to 200.

When I came back to Brazil, the ping took just few minutes to adjust.

Now, that proves to me WoW itself already do a lot of ping optimization. So, I wouldn't bother trying too much other things as you can most likely disrupt its own system than help your ping.

The best thing to do is definitely tweaking your own machine for optimizations. Things like what people already suggested here, such as the Leatrix (thought it really didn't work in my case, on wifi) and getting a cable if you are on wifi.